Blood, Bones, and Butter: The Inadvertent Education of a Reluctant Chef

by Gabrielle Hamilton

  I had been sitting on the little padded bench in the kitchen writing in my treasured red leather diary that locked with a real key and canoodling with Ralph. He was a large tomcat, indifferent to us unless we had food, and we replaced him whenever it became necessary, after death by car wheel or dog chase, with exactly the same cat, and named him the same. For the nearly dozen years that I lived with my family, we had one cat named Ralph. I hoped inordinately each day that the cat would forgo mousing out in the dark nights and instead find my room and my bed and sleep with me. And when he did and he fell asleep dead in the center of my slim single bed, leaving no room for me, I curled up and contorted my own body to sleep around him even if it meant I was hanging on to the outside edge of the mattress and one whisper of the covers. My mother could never understand this. She kicked the cat away from her ankles and said, “Ah la la la la la la. The problem with kittens is they become cats!”

  I heard the thick Sunday newspaper hit the kitchen floor with a thud. And then my mother, who had yanked it out from under my dad’s elbow while he munched the radishes and had dropped it on the floor at his feet, actually smiled when he swept his arm across the entire table and sent every item on it clattering and shattering onto the terra-cotta tile floor. I had no idea what was happening between them. My mother, still smiling, then clasped her hands together in front of her like a schoolmarm waiting for the spitballer to hand over his straw and paper wads, her head tilted disapprovingly down and to the side forming an extra wrinkle under her chin. Turning to me, as if we were old, old friends grooved in a routine of sarcastic observation, she said, “Oh lovely.”

  Looking directly at my father, but addressing herself to me she said, “Gabri, could you please pick up your father’s wonderful display.” And my dad pushed back his chair and walked out.

  Until this moment, more or less, I sat in her lap after dinner every single night. For a period I was too young for after-dinner chores—clearing, washing, drying—and possibly too favored, and so I eagerly crawled up and took my place in her lap, barefoot and drowsy. I leaned back into her soft body and listened to the gurgling as she chewed and swallowed. I breathed in her exhale: wine, vinaigrette, tangerines, cigarette smoke. While all of the others were excused from the table, I got to sit, alone with my mother and father as they finished. I watched her oily lips, her crooked teeth, and felt the treble of her voice down my spine while she had adult conversation and gently rested her chin on the top of my head. She cracked walnuts from the Perigord and picked out the meats, extinguished her occasional cigarette in the empty broken husks, shifted my weight in her lap; she squeezed the tangerine peel into the candle flame and we watched the oils ignite in yellow and blue sparks. I sat in that woman’s aproned lap every single night of my young life, so close to the sounds and smells of her that I still know her body as if it were my own.

  I went everywhere she went. In the car, in the woods, in the market, in the kitchen. She took me to the farm to get our milk. As only a Frenchwoman can—in a heel, a silk scarf, and a cashmere skirt—she’d pull up the long driveway of the dairy farm in her chocolate brown antique Mercedes-Benz, and without a single awkward gesture, get down and fill four rinsed-out gallon plastic jugs with raw milk from a stainless steel tank while forty woolly Holsteins chewed and pissed in the over-humid next room. We left our money in the honor system coffee can. And I sat in the back of that old car, while she struggled with the mechanics of a shifter on the steering column but no clutch on the floor, and inhaled as deeply as I could the stink of the farm and the cow shit that lingered on our skin.

  I still very much like that smell of manure. I like it in my food and my wine and even in certain body odor. That milk was so thick and shitty that the cream separated and rose to the top and we siphoned off three inches from every gallon of milk we brought home. My mom used a turkey baster to extract the cream, and she kept it separate in a jar in the fridge. This entire errand she could run, effortlessly, in suede heels.

  The Stecks were among many French friends my mother had cultivated in our area, and lived a few rural towns away, north of us following the Delaware. Theirs was a deep woods overrun with chanterelles, and we couldn’t ever eat in one sitting all that we had collected. Jean, so recalcitrantly French that he wore a beret, espadrilles, and a blue canvas jacket, sturdily greeted us in his driveway, on damp opportune mornings. His wife, Hilda, with the watery, sagging blue eyes of a basset hound, emerged from the house, a little wobbly. They were old enough to be my mother’s parents. In aggrieved tones, they spoke to each other in French about entirely pleasant subjects, but Hilda’s jowls jiggled with every “oui, oui, oui,” that she offered—in that way that the French have of speaking on inhaling rather than on the exhale, “whey, whey whey”—in apparent commiseration with everything Jean or my mother uttered. And Jean made deep, disapproving faces with the exaggeratedly downturned corners of his sharp mouth. My own mother huffed out phrases I’d been hearing my whole life, “C’est pas vrais!” And “Mais, non?!” and “Oh la la la la la la,” sounding quite miffed and then, abruptly, we cheerfully kissed everybody on both cheeks, and parted ways, calling out, “À bientôt!”

  “Okay, Prune, let’s get going!” she prodded, using her pet name for me, and I followed her into the damp woods where we picked all morning.

  My mother could loosely fill a paper grocery bag—could that be fifteen pounds?—ferreting out the true chanterelles from the poisonous orange look-alikes, and I was taught how to differentiate them by the time I hit first grade. The smell of the moist, loamy dirt and pine needles clinging to their stems and gills permeated the car as I held the paper sack on my lap the whole car ride home.

  In the spring, in the surrounding woods, we walked, and she pointed out to me the Johnny-jump-ups and jack-in-the-pulpits also just coming up at that time of year, and with paring knives we cut the fiddlehead ferns still tightly coiled like snail shells and took them home for a quick blanche and then sauté. Dandelion grew everywhere in our back meadow once summer came on fully, and occasionally she’d pick it and make salad, using lots of fat and eggs and bacon to temper the bitterness.

  She taught me to eat common clover—the purple and white blossoms that grew in the grass in the meadow, which you could chew on and suck the sweetness from while searching for a four-leafer. From her I learned how to pull the pistils out of the honeysuckle flowers and eat the one small bead of pure clear sugar water. While many mothers were ever alert and poised to keep their kids from shoving sticks and rocks and bugs in their mouths, ours, on the contrary, locked us outside every day even in the rain and demonstrated to us how to eat slugs and grass. We’d tromp around in the mud and taunt the geese in the meadow who’d lower their necks and come at us hissing mad, try to spear fish in the stream, and pick the big black berries off the mulberry bushes near our mailbox while inside our mother would whistle along with the classical music station, stir pots of fragrant stews, and repose in her chair, howling out loud, a New Yorker open on her lap and a particular cartoon cutting her in half.

  One summer my mother took just me out of all the kids, just me, to Greece, and it was with her on that trip that I accidentally got drunk for the first time, even though we’d had watered wine at the dinner table plenty of times.

  “We’ll split a big bottle,” I remember her saying, referring to those mega beers they serve in Europe that you rarely saw in America. We were inside the kitchen of a tiny taverna on the island of Ios, she in Jackie-O sunglasses and a bright patterned headscarf, looking in the pans on the top of the stove while the cook held the lids. I was flat-chested in my T-shirt, in boys’ shoes, such a tomboy that I was always given the key to the men’s room when I asked at gas stations or restaurants to use the bathroom, and not quite nine years old.

  I pointed to the pastitsio, as I did at every meal that I didn’t order the moussaka, as it was so greasy and delicious and the closest thing to Hamburger Helper I’d ever get to see. We sat at a little wooden tab
le outside under a tree. She poured the tall beer into our two short glasses and when we finished our lunch and got up to head back to our whitewashed rented rooms, we discovered I was bombed.

  I weaved while she stayed the course back to our cool, spare rooms where we napped through the hottest part of the afternoon; outside, a small war of blue sky and wild oregano and buzzing bees and someone’s lone donkey up the hillside, shrieking out his bray in that train-tracks-on-steel-rails way, was waged. Voula, our smiling thick-middled proprietess, sun-dried her own grapes and figs on straw matting right on the roof above while her husband, Iannis, cleaned his fishing nets in the shade. Even through my disoriented beer high and in spite of my age, I could see in them that unspeaking way that married people who live directly from the ancient land, with only olive trees and fish from the sea and tomato vines, have of moving around each other and their life’s chores, of pausing briefly in the afternoon and squinting out at the same horizon where the sea meets the sky and becomes indivisible, like themselves.

  HERE IN OUR KITCHEN, with the mustard streaked across the floor and the cabinets and my dad’s uneaten lunch and my mother’s half-prepared dinner scattered about the floor, I watched while my mother smiled unemotionally, surveying the debris of their own life’s chores, her eyes resting for a moment on the few dusty cement footprints left by my father’s boots and I thought, What a fucking bitch.

  I scrambled off that bench and was down on all fours as fast as the cat. There was adrenaline pumping through my own heart, but for some reason I was smiling, too, and had to hold back giggling, I was so startled and so awed and exhilarated. I had never felt such profanity come into my thoughts with such effortlessness. I had never been this alert or this awake in reality. The cutting board that Todd had made in ninth-grade shop class that looked like a raquetball paddle made of solid maple, the bread knife, the bread, the hunks of dry cured salami, the Jarlsberg cheese, the radishes, his beer bottle, butter, hard-boiled eggs, and cornichons were suddenly scattered across the kitchen, and I was on all fours gathering it all up.

  Still, I had no idea their divorce was coming. None. “Family Meeting,” my mom called out, and late in the afternoon, with dusty yellow sun slanting in, we assembled in the long narrow dining room, all of us at the dark wooden table that had so many leaves it could be extended to seat twenty-four. Simon and I were lying down on the oriental rug, Ralph between us, vying for his attention by pattering our fingers on the carpet and making little psst-ing noises. The cat ignored us both and I turned my attention to the very large bushel of apples my mother kept in the coolest part of the room. My mother shopped in bulk, like a restaurateur. With five kids in the house she never had a small decorative still-life type of fruit bowl on the dining room table with just two pears, a melon, and an apple. She bought whole legs of lamb, four gallons of milk at a time, whole wheels of cheese.

  I was gazing at that full bushel of apples when she made her stunning, preposterous announcement, that I have possibly never recovered from. “Jim, it’s over, and the kids and I have decided you should go.”

  3

  IT PROBABLY TOOK OVER A YEAR, OR ALMOST TWO, TO DISMANTLE THE family. But I was eleven turning twelve, and I felt as if I fell asleep by the lamb pit one night and woke up the next morning to an empty house, a bare cupboard, the leftover debris of a wild and brilliant party, and only half an inch of Herbal Essence left in the bottle on the ledge in the shower. At that age, washing my hair and how I was going to wash my hair with no parents and no shampoo felt utterly important to me. I walked around the empty ruins of the mill that was our home, looking in all the cabinets and drawers and closets to see what there was left that I still recognized, and claimed for myself anything I fancied, not unlike a looter the day after a blackout.

  I don’t know how they technically worked it out, my parents—what the actual physical arrangements were that they had made for us when they decided to split up—but I think it’s probable that my dad was supposed to be in charge of us that next summer the year following their finalized divorce. And it’s possible that he wasn’t entirely up to the job. Because that first summer after their divorce, my seventeen-year-old brother Simon and I were left alone—and this I remember acutely—for weeks. This may have been an oversight, like leaving your cup of coffee on the roof of the car while you dig out your keys and then drive off. Or wishful thinking on my parents’ part that their two youngest children were old enough to fend for themselves. Either way, Simon and I were on our own. And we were better off, we seemed to agree without discussing it, each to fend for himself.

  If this happened now, a government agency would have been called. But not in 1979 in our small benign town, where we were a big, well-known family. The older kids were accounted for, in a relatively natural way—Jeffrey, at eighteen, had taken that anthropological impulse of his and hitchhiked to Africa. By the time my parents were splitting he was already deep in the Ituri forest in Zaire, a wannabe Colin Turnbull, in a loincloth, hunter-gathering with a tribe of pygmies. Todd, with his collection of electric and acoustic guitars, was already popular on the Skidmore campus, even as a sophomore, in his band Tempo Tantrum. Melissa was finishing her first year at Sarah Lawrence and spent that summer in New York City in love with her first real boyfriend, a smoker, a literary snob, and, I always thought, a little bit mean.

  Our mother had moved to a profoundly remote and rural part of northern Vermont. Something about that setting she—at that time a rage-prone, menopausal, highly distressed woman with the ink barely dry on her divorce papers and two sullen teenagers in tow—found soothing. But it was one that held no appeal for me and Simon, whom she had pulled out of school and taken with her. And after a long winter school year in Vermont, which we joined a couple of months after it had already started, we returned, decisively and definitively, to our dad and the remnants of the house we grew up in for our first summer after their divorce.

  My father, for his part, had bought the Barry Gibb and Barbra Streisand Duets album and played “What Kind of Fool” over and over and over, like a much younger man, or even a heartbroken boy, might have done.

  It was kind of tremendous timing to hit adolescence just as the family was disintegrating. It’s not too bad to live out your Pippi Longstocking fantasy right when you most seek independence from your parents and are practicing it so ardently. There was no curfew and no dress code. My distracted, self-absorbed dad was probably trying to figure it all out himself—how to be forty-five and single after all those years of being married to a woman I believe he loved emphatically and who brought such concrete order to his otherwise watercolor life. He worked forever hours, then fell asleep in his bed with the light on and the crossword puzzle half-finished, and his felt-tipped pens left large black ink spots where they bled into the sheets.

  But that summer happened to coincide with one of my dad’s worst financial periods ever. Some had been bad, but this would not be bone-issimo. Nor bone-ified. This would be the summer of boneless living. Gasoline was being rationed and you could fill up your car only on odd or even days, according to the date on your inspection sticker. My father was being so aggressively pursued by banks and creditors that our home phone—the bone phone—began to ring punctually every morning starting at seven-thirty. My dad went to New York and hid there for the bulk of summer, launching a show for which he’d designed the sets. That show just made it through previews and all of eight performances before they were taking down the marquee letters “Got Tu Go Disco!” and nobody got paid what they were owed. I answered the phone every morning and gave truthfully vague answers concerning my dad’s whereabouts, not to derail the creditors, but because I actually didn’t know where he was or when he would be able to be reached.

  There followed one of the many, many fall semesters when we each arrived on our various campuses only to be barred from registration and directed to the bursar’s office, where the administrator shook her head “no” unsympathetically and seemed to enjoy, on s
ome level, that cocktail of panic and humiliation and despair blooming in us. Private schools for all five children, both in high school and college, in spite of the artist’s paycheck?

  Overreaching? Not in our vernacular. De-Bone-aire. My father has said a hundred times, and I have paid attention, that it’s stupid to let money be the reason you don’t do something.

  By the time my parents might have realized—a glance in the rearview mirror—that they’d abandoned us, we were not to be recovered. That summer was the definitive end of some things and the rather hastened beginning of many others. While Pippi charmingly moved her horse onto the porch and wore mismatched striped socks when she found herself alone, I smoked cigarette butts salvaged from public ashtrays and sidewalks and retrieved from the asphalt from passing drivers who flicked them out the car window. I wore Candie’s spiked heels that I shoplifted and a watermelon-red tube top. I did my first line of coke, and then my second and third, and made lots of “friends” in town who, like me, had no curfew and nobody watching, but who, unlike me, were twenty and not thirteen. I hastily grazed through the menu of adult behavior and tried on whatever seemed attractive, for whatever inchoate reasons, as they occurred to me. It was a spectacularly scattershot and eclectic approach, as I found myself still going to Little League practice in the afternoons while reading D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love at night, because it had a photograph of naked people in bed on the back jacket.